Metamemory - How does the brain predict itself?

Before I introduce our speaker for tonight, I'd like to remind you all that today we actually did something that as physicists hadn't been done ever and that's *** neutrons together very high energy and we have a couple of the physicists that are involved in the experiments are here, and my Associate Dean who is a physicist, Elliott Cheu, we should congratulate him because he's one of those that built one of the detectors. So a funny thing happened to me on the way here. actually. somebody gave me a piece of paper that sort of sounds like a plant. This gentleman which I don't know can stand up and say that he wasn't a plant. He has some thoughts and questions. He has some questions that up he would me to answer. He asked the question will there be additional lectures this summer or this fall. Of course for this lecture series there is one more lecture next week that has to do with ethics and our brain. Then it says in here, Can you direct us to new information resulting in ongoing university research? Are there journals or University publications that we need to have subscriptions to? And will there be future lectures on age dementia and how to slow down its process? The reason I say it's sort of like a plant is because starting next week on the third (of April) in fact, were opening Flandrau Planetarium again. The Flandrau Planetarium will be the portal of science and technology to all of you to all of us So what we need from anybody that's interested are these two things. To make sure that you do sign up on those papers that they give when coming into the Centennial Hall so that we can send you information of this sort. Flandrau will have a web site which will be sending out information to anybody about exciting things that we're doing at the University of Arizona and I hope that you will allow us to send you this information so that you can join us with the exciting opportunities and we'll have Flandrau. The Planetarium will be open we have a beautiful mineral collection showing right now but this will be changing continuously and importantly 0:02:43:000,0:02:45.750 the web site will be sending you information of theist sort. Thanks for the questions. Again, I would like to thank our underwriters for this lecture series, The Arizona Daily Star, *** Communications, Bob Davis, Galileo Circle, Godat Design, Thomas and Cande Grogan, Raytheon, Research Corp for Science Advancement, UniSource Energy. Without their support we would be charging all of you. [applause] So we've heard in this lecture series about the brain a little bit. how it's all wired, the plasticity of the brain. We've heard a little bit about how children learn, We had lecture in which we we figured out how we are wired because of evolution. Today I am really excited to have Al Kaszniak, who is the department head in Psychology, tell us a little bit about metamemory. Al Kaszniak received his Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology from the University of Illinois in 1976 and he completed an internship in clinical psychology at Rush Medical Center in Chicago. He is currently head of the department, as I mentioned, Director of Clinical Neuropsychology, director of the Arizona Alzheimer's Consortium Education Core and Professor in the Department of Psychology, Neurology, and Psychiatry at the University of Arizona So, if your foot hurts, anything else you can see Al and he'll probably fix it. His research has focused on the neuro-psychology of Alzheimer's Disease age related neurological disorders, consciousness, memory, and the monitoring of self-emotion. Doctor Kaszniak has been an adviser to various national institutes and agency's concerned with aging and Alzheimer's Disease. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a Fellow the Association for Psychological Science. We are indeed lucky to have Al here tonight to give us a lecture and we're equally as lucky to have him as a colleague here at the University of Arizona. It's a pleasure working with Al. Please welcome Al to this evening's lecture. Thank you Joaquin for the kind words of introduction. Thank you all for being here. It is so gratifying to see so many of you, many old friends, young friends and what we all hope will be new friends for the College of Science. I'm going to be talking about metamemory. But before I define what that is I would like to start by telling you a little bit about a clinical mystery that first presented itself to me in the middle 1980s. Not too long after we had started our memory disorders clinic, that I had co-directed over at University Medical Center. The mystery starts off with a patient we will arbitrarily call M.T. who was referred to us for consultation to see whether we could assist with diagnosis and in the planning of treatment and this individual had a very severe memory impairment. When I met him in the lobby I introduced myself. I then went into the examining room and 15 minutes later he was brought in there had no idea that we had met already - so quite severe memory impairment. And he seemed very aware of that impairment. He could complain to me about it when I would present him with various memory tests that we do in the clinic he was able to say "You know that's exactly the kind of thing I have a really hard time with I know I'm going to do really terrible." And he did. In contrast an individual we will call patient A. D. had an equally severe memory impairment. Same situation, met her in the lobby, into the examining room, didn't recognize we had met before but she seemed quite unaware of the severity of her impairment. when I asked her why she was there to see me, talked about something irrelevant and when we started the testing she would frequently comment, "Oh my memory has always always been really good. This is going to be way too simple for me." And then, of course, would have enormous difficulty with it. Some frustration from time to time while doing it but upon completing the task seemed to have no awareness that, in fact, it revealed a very very compromised memory. So, the question these two people posed to me was, with equally severe memory impairment why are they so different in their apparent awareness of that impairment. And a bigger question for me that arose was if memory is a function of brain processes as we've been hearing about in this lecture series then how does the brain predict its own future activity? How does the brain know what it's going to be able to do, remember, etc., at some point in the future? It's the neuro-scientific area of metamemory research that tends to answer those questions. So let's begin with a couple of quick definitions. The dictionary definition of memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience and the act, or instance, of remembering. In contrast, metamemory is defined as knowledge about one's own memory capabilities and contents, and knowledge about strategies that can aid in memory. Lest you think that this big mouthful, metamemory, suggests that this is something arcane and that only nerdy scientists care about each of you utilizes metamemory on a daily basis. So how many of you drove here this evening all right now most of you I suspect anticipated finding your car. How do you know that? How do you know that you're going to be able to locate your car? I go to the airport and park before a trip, what I know with great confidence is I won't remember where it is when I get back. So I'm going to write it down. That's metamemory at work. That's the process by which the brain is making predictions about its own future processes. Scholars, such as this harried young faculty member, how does this person know when the arcane text has been studied sufficiently and he'll be able to remember it the following morning in a lecture and we can now give himself some well-deserved rest? We utilize metamemory when we're studying all of you who are students a former students out there you've had this kind of experience, right? From the book, through the head, gone forever. But you are often aware of that at the time and what do you do? You catch yourself, you go back and you re-read. or you think about it in a different way. You might recast it, you use some kind of a strategy that enables you to remember it better. And it's the ability to know that it's not getting in and ability to select a strategy that will help get it in that's a part of this thing we call metamemory Now that second individual in the clinical mystery I told you about, patient A. D., turned out to have Alzheimer's Disease. Terrible illness, as I think as most of you know. It's quite prevalent about 5.3 million of us in the United States have it. Projections are that by the year 2050 that number will triple. Very, very disturbing. It is age associated. The older we get the higher our risk developing it. It's presently irreversible even though many of us are working very *** trying to find a prevention and cure and it's a the major cause of this syndrome of dementia by which we mean a decline in 2 or more areas of mental functioning one of them typically being memory. Now if we take a look as if we are gazing from the side of the head and we were all Superman or Superwoman we could gaze inside the skin in the skull what we would see is the brain revealed in which there are certain landmarks so here right behind the eyes we see an area called the frontal lobes and right behind that the parietal lobes and underneath that the temporal lobes and behind that the occipital lobes. No other similar looking on both sides two separate hemisphere's underneath it the cerebellum and then connected on the bottom the brain stem continuous with the spinal cord. Ao I want you to keep in mind that orientation because I'll try to utilize most of my images from that same kind of angle. If we were to further tune up our X-RAY vision what we would see penetrating deeper within the brain is that there are some structures that lie underneath this outer most part of the brain, the cortex, which means bark the outer most covering of a tree and a very important one for memory is this structure shown right here the hippocampus it's bilateral meeting there's one of them on each side. And it was this structure that was quite damage in the first person in that clinic a mystery that I told you about. He had sustained to a cardiac arrest his brain was deprived of oxygen for a critical period of time leaving a certain nerve cells within that structure 0:13:01.660,0:13:03.740 permanently damaged. But in a circumscribed way, other areas were not damaged. In contrast, patient A. D. who seemed so unaware of her memory impairment also has damage to this structure, microscopic damage that's a part of Alzheimer's Disease, but in addition as this progresses - here we're looking from the side in this time we're looking at the middle surface of that right side of the brain gazing in from the left - what you can see is in the pre-clinical stages while things are still mild can't really be confidently diagnosed the damage is relatively circumscribed to that temporal lobe where the hippocampus is located deep within and a little bit of the bottom of that frontal lobe but as the illness progresses from mild to even more severe stages increasing amounts of the brain affected. To only the areas responsible for processing basic sensory information and controlling movement that are left relatively intact. So that's a widespread amount of brain that's affected by this illness. One aspect of that is making the contribution of impairing the person's awareness of their memory impairment. Why are people with this illness different in that way than the person I just previously described who had the cardiac arrest related damage to that memory important hippocampus. In order to address that question and look at the relationship between damage in the brain and metamemory difficulty it's necessary to bring metamemory into the laboratory. So how is it that we might do that? What we decided to do is utilize a number of different kinds of tasks, finally arriving at the one we rely on most which is called feeling-of-knowing task which attempts to tap into this phenomenon feeling-of-knowing. Feeling-of-knowing defined as a subjective state in which the person is trying to remember something that they believe they know but can't now retrieve. Back in 1890, William James one of the fathers of scientific psychology had this to say about feeling-of-knowing as it occurs in the tip-of-the-tongue experience. It's "a gap that is intensely active a sort of wraith of the name is in it beckoning us in a given direction making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term." Sounds familiar? For for those of you who are similar to myself are members of the gray hair persuasion you may have noticed that this increases with frequency as we get older Okay? Tip-of-the-tongue experience manifesting this feeling of knowing so what kind of a task can construct to get at this? We us a kind of verbal memory task in which there were three different phases. The first is the study phase. We present the individual with a set of sentences constructed such that the very last word of the sentence is of low frequency. In other words it's not very easily predictable from the first part of the sentence. So that people can't simply guess what the correct last word might be and we give several such sentences in this study or learning phase. In the next phase of it we then show the individual the sentence stem she showed her friend for example a new card ask the person to recall what's the correct completion of that sentence. Following that answer we ask the person to give a retrospective confidence rating. In other words how certain are you that you gave the correct answer? From extremely uncertain to extremely certain. And then for those sentences that they don't correctly complete we ask them to give the critical feeling of knowing rating and what we're requesting here is the individual to predict that later when I show them and multiple choices for what that completing last word might be they'll be able to identify the correct one and so pure guess low probably or high probability of correctly recognizing it. Then finally the recognition task itself where we again provide that sentence stem along with these multiple choices and critically for the variable of interest here we're looking at the feeling of knowing accuracy, defined as the concordance between the feeling-of-knowing prediction and the actual recognition memory success. Okay. Reasonable and straightforward memory paradigm. So what did we find in relationship to Alzheimer's Disease. Studying the number of individuals and comparing them to their spouse caregivers we found that accuracy for both retrospective confidence ratings as well as different ways of measuring were applying a metric to this feeling of knowing the accuracy and both of those instances the persons with Alzheimer's Disease were less accurate than their spouses, documenting that there is a metamemory impairment that's associated with this illness. As we began to do work in this area and study some other neurologic groups a number of other investigators across the world were similarly getting interested in this and by 2005 there had been enough studies that have been published for us to do a review of what has been learned from this area of investigation. One of my former graduate students, Jasmine Pano [?] and myself reviewed that literature and what we found was that in addition to Alzheimer's Disease. metamemory was being confirmed in the laboratory also in human immunodeficiency virus infection when it involves the brain in multiple sclerosis when it's not just in the spinal court but also in the brain. Huntington's Disease, a genetic disease that involves both a movement disorder and progressive dementia. Korsakoff's syndrome, a very severe memory impairment, typically caused by chronic alcohol abuse and thiamine deficiency and traumatic brain injury particularly will be more severe when the individual had a period of unconsciousness for a while so what is it that all of these apparently diversity indices share in common they have different causes or ideologies, they manifest somewhat differently all of them manifesting this metamemory impairment each of them involves some damage to these front lobes of the brain particularly these two front most part of it that we call the prefrontal area. Well that's a pretty big expansive real estate in your brain, is it not? Are there particular areas within it, or structures within it, that are most important? now in order to ask that question we have to move away from these indices that affect the brain in a more generalized or more diffuse way and start looking at neurologic disorders that damage a very circumscribed part of the brain. And so the syndrome of course that we went to was stroke. Here one particular cause of stroke, that being a blood clot, that travels along an artery until the diameter of the artery gets sufficiently expanded and it blocks the flow in the area of the brain that is being fed by that vessel is deprived of oxygen and nutrients and that tissue dies. That is a stroke and another kind of stroke is when there's bleeding in the brain but for simplicity sake we'll pretend that this is the major kind and in fact this was the major cause for most of the individuals that we studied. So it took us about 3 years to accumulate enough individuals that were willing to volunteer for study who had this circumscribed damage to the frontal lobe, to the front part the of the brain. And even though these individuals did not have obvious memory impairment like the people that I was describing in the so-called clinical mystery, On average they had impairment in their metamemory that is they were quite poor at predicting what they would later to be able to recognize. It confirmed an association of metamemory with damage to the frontal lobes but as of yet we don't know very much more about where within this expanse of the frontal lobes the critical location of damage might be. So here we went to so-called structural neuro-imaging magnetic resonance imaging in particular and here in schematic we've got a cut-away view, so we've opened up the side of the machine, you can see the individual lying on that table inside of this large magnet with radio frequency coils and receding coils the combination of extraordinarily creative physics and computer science an expert engineering has resulted in a technology that lets us see in a three-dimensional way within the brain. And because the signals that are being picked up are very sensitive to the molecular composition of the tissue in this strong magnetic field able to differentiate living healthy tissue from damaged tissue also enables us as shown here to take different slices of the brain. Here we've gone from one side of the head moving toward the center moving then beyond the center continuing on to the other side of the head and finally getting to the outer most part of the skull. We can also visualize in other directions so here starting at the back of the head moving forward seeing the cerebellum the ears will soon begin to show - here they are - we move increasingly forward the brain stem the fluid filled spaces within the brain we continue to move forward and we see eventually the eyeballs manifesting and way up in the front most part of the brain. Aliens, huh. Detailed visualization of the 0:24:34.179,0:24:36.880 contents of the skull, the cranial contents, in a way that provides us a lot of information about areas that are damaged. And what it allows this thing to do - here we're looking from the top of the brain down - the nose would be up at the front part, these are different slices from so fairly far down in the brain increasingly far up until we get to this top one and the black areas show us where the damage has occurred. So we can assume from the information from those slices together with the aid of the computer we can reconstruct a three dimensional image that allows us then to morph the different brains of each of the individuals in other words put them onto a common scale, put them on to a common idealized brain so that all of the areas are located in the same place and ask the question for those people who show the most severe metamemory impairment, in other words who are the poorest in this prediction of their later recognition memory performance What is in common between them? Where's there overlap in the damage? And what we found was that that overlap is in this right right side of the brain - here we've cut away the from on the left hemisphere so we can see inside the brain - we've done that with computer reconstruction So it's in there right middle, or medial, prefrontal or front-most part of the brain. That encourages our suspicion that this area is playing an important role. in these metamemory processes. But, that's one kind of a test, this verbal feeling-of-knowing task. Does that metamemory impairment extend to other areas beyond the verbal domain and perhaps to include faces? I don't think any of you would quible with the statement that memory for faces it was an important faculty something we rely on every day. It's how we know someone is familiar. But imagine what would happen, you gentleman out there, if you thought that the face of a stranger was your wife and acted accordingly Well, your face might be in trouble. That's got to hurt, don't you think? So we constructed a task utilizing famous faces faces of individuals that are well known, in the media, sports, that sort of thing and for the retrospective confidence task analogous to the verbal one I talked about before we showed a series of these faces sequentially. People were given 8 multiple-choice names to choose from. Asked who is this person? And then they made a retrospective confidence judgment - how confident are they that they are correct. It might look something like this. I'm just going to give you three choices to make it easy - it's late Who's that? Uma Thurman, Okay? Very popular in the movies recently. And then you'd be asked to make that that confidence judgment; how confident are you that you chose the correct name? For the feeling-of-knowing task we ask you to actually name the individual and then if you can't come up with the name we ask you again how confidential you are that you'll be able to the name the person if you're given a multiple choice the face is very familiar to you so we have some that are famous famous not so famous less famous and then there's a recognition memory task at the end so that we can compute this concordance of correspondents, how accurate is their prediction? So who's that? okay. Little less vocal, fewer of you knew. who that is. Most of you who do are my age or older What? You don't watch re-runs of the Parent Trap? That's Hayley Mills. As in our previous study what we observed was that those individuals with frontal damage who had the lowest feeling-of-knowing accuracy Showed this region of overlap of damage within this so-called ventromedial or lower middle area area of the front lobe. That area, maybe, is the chief participant something that provides a necessary contribution to the way in which the brain makes predictions about its future activity. But we don't know, really whether it's that area or connecting fibers that are passing through it the damaged brain doesn't allow us to disentangle those two possibilities. So we then moved to another technology utilizing the same magnetic resonance imaging machinery that I just showed you but this time measuring a blood oxygen level dependent signal. Now, what that reflects is blood flow to neuron brain areas that are metabolically active. When an area is doing work it is more metabolically active it is requiring more blood, more oxygen, more nutrients. So that allows us to image brain areas that are at work during particular stimulus or task conditions and also it allows us to visualize quite small regions of the brain at a level of resolution or ability to visualize an area much more fine grain than we'd be able to infer from looking at different areas of damage. So this gives you a kind of cartoon of how that works. You'll notice if you watch this that when there's the simple cross-haired patterns the activity is more toward the back of the brain and when it switches to this animate kind of object more reflected in activity in these more lateral or side more most portions. This is an area of the brain that tends to code for very simple kind of visual lines and angles the other area is one that is specialized for detecting biological motion - motion of beings. In the technology of functional magnetic resonance imaging what we are doing is always contrasting two different kinds of conditions as I've shown you here. So that we can determine what is unique keeping everything else constant, it's all visual stimuli the same environment keeping everything else constant except the variable of critical interest. And in our case it's going to be this metamemory or memory self-awareness self-prediction. So again we used faces as the task we asked "Who is that?" Most of you know Marilyn Monroe . But we can't ask you to say it in the scanner because what happens when you talk is that your head moves and the brain image gets blurry. This motion artifact we don't want that so instead we use a simple 3 button mouse that the person is holding onto in this scanner and they make a choice with one of 3 button presses of either they know the name, they've retrieved it successfully; they can't retrieve it but they have a feeling that they know it; or they simply don't know who that is at all. And of course afterwards we do a recognition task just to make sure that they're accurate and since these are healthy individuals it's not that hard of the task. Accuracy was up well above 90%. What we do then is based upon their response after all of this blood oxygen dependent information is collected we've group that information according to those responses so we can contrast what's associated with successful retrieval, what's associated with a feeling-of-knowing. So who's that? A few of you know Rob Lowe, somewhat less famous unless you read the tabloids and we don't want to go there. How about this person? None of you know? Me either. That's because while this individual was blessed with a face that looks like it could be famous she is not. When we looked at the appropriate contrast or comparison what we found was that feeling-of-knowing was associated again as we saw with the focal damage studies with this right frontal as well as another structure called the anterior cingulate cortex right in the same region. First of all look at how much finer of the grain greater specificity we can have about where the critical region might be. But convergence of information with the focal damage studies now that was quite different from what we saw to be associated with successful retrieval of the face names in which the medial temporal, that's what's shown in the crosshairs here, and some of these parietal areas were activated that again remember that's where the hippocampus is, that's that very memory important structure. So memory and metamemory separable within the brain. Not where those functions live but structures that contribute critically to the carrying out of those processes. A number of other studies have also found activation within this medial prefrontal area and they primarily included tasks that included memory for self-traits - I give you a series of adjectives and I ask you whether those are either like or not like you and also tasks that ask you to make plans or to formulate aspirations for the future. So we may conclude that this medial prefrontal cortex is participating in a kind of computation of the self that which maintains the continuity of our identity across time remembering our past And using what we know from memory to construct scenarios and make predictions about the future. So it's a way that the brain can weave together its knowledge of our preferences, our values our ethnicity our beliefs our possessions our occupations - all those things that are part of self identity. Now it turns out that that computed self, as I'll call it is also used by our brain to simulate the experience of others and predict their behavior. so in a classical task that's called the Sally-Anne test it goes as follows. Their salary on the left, there's Anne on the right, Sally puts her ball in the basket she then goes away leaves the scene and while she's gone and moves the ball from the basket to the box the critical question is then where will Sally look for ball? well if you are an adult or a child over about the age of 4 what are you going to say? Okay. The group said that she was going to look for it in that basket because that's where Sally put it. You are able to utilize that simulation capacity recreating yourself and transforming it into what is the perspective of the other would be like. If you're 3 years old what you're going to say is she's going to look in the box because that's what you the participants saw and you're not able to make that switch. When that kind of task is done in the brain scanner what is found is that this area, this time we've reversed the brain so now the the nose is facing to your right in all these images that same area of the medial prefrontal cortex is activated in this so-called theory of mind or mentalizing or mind reading task and that is the same area along with something a little further back that for right now we're not going to talk about but some areas activated when we remember and when we project into the future or imagine the future. So this has been referred to as an interconnected medial temporal network making use of this medial or middle temporal structure hippocampus and those areas that it's the most densely connected to again, a kind of self-generating stimulating machinery. Very recently it was discovered that if we look at what the brain is doing at rest when individuals are not giving any task to perform it's the same areas that are activated. What's going on? What are we doing when we're at rest? We're not listening We're computing the self. "Ah, I forgot to do that today. I gotta get up tomorrow early and finish that and i'll see what she said probably mean she doesn't like me very well." yadda yadda yadda me me me. Computing the self. Computing the self is very useful as we've seen from making predictions about what you're likely to do in the future and what others are likely to do in the future and what others are likely to be experiencing but it can take care of the way, right? So, as Caravaggio in his famous painting Narcissus illustrated that kind of activation of the self can lead to self-absorption. Narcissus gazing fondly at his image in the water. What can we do about that? Self preoccupation is annoying to friends and family. You probably don't want to do it all that much. It also distracts us. The brain is a limited channel capacity processor, it can't do too many things at the same time and if it's computing the self it's not paying attention to what's here right now. We're going to miss a lot. We're going to miss things that other people are saying to us - my wife is in the audience she knows about this. We're going to miss some of the things they're going on around us. So what are we going to do about that? Is there some thing we can learn to help us disengage from that self-focus? Well for a number of thousands of years now ancient traditions have used the kind of mental training a practice that individuals use to train their attention focusing upon some particular object very often the breath, it's convenient you carry around with you all the time, and when that me me starts to be generated polls the attention away gently disengaging returning back to the focus over and over and over again.. And the claim that is made it's that that practice is enabling of a more fluid disengagement from self-focus. So, does science have anything to say about that? The recent study by a friend and colleague Ted [?] found that when you give individuals words or non-words that you flash before them the words tend to activate if you will self-system or default system. Here you can see that medial frontal area, some of those more back or posterior areas so those words create associations and those associations are referent to the self. But when they look to add individuals who Zen meditate with 3 or more years of practice experience and they studied the actual time course of these blood oxygen level responses what they found was Zen meditators showed in red the meditation naive individual shown in blue that in each of those areas The Zen meditators where returning to baseline more quickly. As if the brian were saying "yes" what they're saying they're letting go of that self-activation more readily, they're more fluid and disengaging the word is gone back to rest. number of other studies have similarly suggested that with that kind of practice there is increasing skill but being able to disengage that computed self and attend - as my granddaughter is doing here to her first experience of hearing a rooster crow - to the environment around us. So I think we've got some hope perhaps that neuroscience not only provides us with interesting things to talk about on a Wednesday night when other stuff is too expensive to get admission to but also something that in our 21st century where science provides so much of the guidance for our lives a kind of bridge to traditions to practices they're quite ancient but that may provide us with a way of being able to quiet down that self preoccupation attend to the world in which there is enormous suffering but also incredible beauty. Thank you all so much for being here this evening. Any questions? My father died at 95 with almost no recognition of what he ate for lunch what had happened the day before Yet, when I said "Do you remember any John Keats?" the week before he died he actually picked a verse of 'Nightingale' there's about mortality and he would smile when he saw numbers on license plates that had square roots and interesting mathematics. Do you have any insights into this? We know each other so I'm first tempted to say that your father is just weird. [laughter] [laughter] [laughter] I may have a more informed answer about that and that is that in these progressive degenerative dementias, and you didn't say it but perhaps he had Alzheimer's Disease, there are a number of brain disorders that can create this One of the things we've found, and i'll say probably a good 25 years or so ago is that is that memories that were established long ago, and particularly those that we've had some occasion to rehearse, and so a favorite poet is something that he had occasion to bring to mind these are memories that seem to remain relatively intact for a longer period. Something that is of particular interest to the person like mathematical symbols - something that's reminiscent of a favorite hobby that will stay preserved for a longer period of time. It's the day to day experience that may not make reference to those preferred but familiar themes that seems to go the earliest. Thank you. yes? When you describe what you what you call the whole system, the memory system, is working too much does it disturb does it make noise that stops the brain from working as effectively as it should be? So the question is whether this default network that I mentioned is active at rest Is this something that gets in the way of establishing another memories? And the answer I think is yes the brain is a limited capacity device and it cannot process many things at the same time and so if the tension is being drawn to reminiscence future planning the kind of of mental chatter - I mentioned contemplative disciplines may refer to this as 'monkey mind' jumping from one branch to another one thing to another continuously after the been continuously distracted and so they are now a number of studies - some completed some ongoing - that are demonstrating that these kinds of mental training practices, attention training practices, even for relatively short periods of time, an 8 week kind of intensive practice makes a significant difference in attention and in encoding information into memory. In the case of amnesia is the metamemory affected? The question is, in the case of amnesia is metamemory affected? It depends on the kind of amnesia. So in the clinical mysteries that I started off with the very first person has an amnesia or an amnestic syndrome due to circumscribed or limited damage to these hippocampal bodies. That person does not have a metamemory impairment. But when the damage extends beyond those structures particularly into this middle frontal area that's when metamemory is also impaired. I worked with many people who have had severe dementia and also Alzheimer's and most of them, before they died, had moments of lucidity where they recognized people and they spoke and I was wondering how that could be. The question is that she works with people with Alzheimer's Disease and other causes of dementia. And many of them before they die have moments of lucidity. of being clear, apparently. It's a wonderful question and one that we don't have and the answer to. There's a very moving story time that some of you may have had come across of an individual with Alzheimer's Disease who seemed just abysmally bad, was no longer recognizing any family members not able to do very much at all for himself and within literally hours before he died said to his wife "I'm okay don't worry" and passed away. How does that happen? What goes on? What rallies in the brain? What changes happen as we approach that great mystery of death? We don't know. Wonderful question. I've been, from time to time, let's say appalled or overwhelmed by the vastness of my own memory. And I have yet to find the explanations for this on the personal level. I tend to lean toward quantum physical processes to explain the depth of it, the expensiveness of it the sense of the micro-cosmos of the medieval consciousness. Thank you so he is very impressed with the vastness, how big his memory is. Men often think their memory is bigger memory is bigger than it actually is [laughter] [laughter] It's an optical illusion. [laughter] I'm sorry, you gave me an opening [laughter] It's a wonderful question. And what I would suggest is that we are likely to discover we are likely to discover in years hence that our models of how the brain operates, that wonderful discussion that Dr. Tolbert provided you, those are our current models about what's really important synaptic communication in the brain. Speed of neural transmission when these other cells insulate and cover the brain cells. But there are other things that's good one. A colleague of mine, Stuart Hameroff, works very hard and on a theoretical perspective in which quantum events in the brain thought until not so long ago to be theoretically impossible because the brain is a very warm environment in these things usually occur and super cold kind of temperatures more recent discovery suggesting some plausibility and that these phenomenon may play an important role in consciousness. Bby the way, for those of you who are interested in these very big questions these philosophic questions, these questions make contact with theoretic physics and other deep science dimensions there is a conference in Tucson coming up toward the science of consciousness it's going to occur in April Dr. Hameroff is now the director of our Center for Conscious to Study, something I used to direct it's great fun, it's soup to nuts É literally [laughter] Dean Ruiz: Before this turns into vaudeville, thank you so much thank you